The work regimen of the past year has required many of us to become friends with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and other previously underappreciated video conferencing platforms.

I’m not sure I could have survived (professionally) without them. And for a while I wasn’t sure I could survive with them.

In my professional life, I lead a lot of workshops and interactive meetings. At first, it was really difficult—even uncomfortable—moving those online. I didn’t know how to deal with the awkward silence when nobody would answer my questions; I wasn’t sure whether to ask people to turn their videos on or to let them remain off-screen and feel like they were ignoring me, and I found it awkward to intervene when someone in a large group—all of whom were working remotely by then—forgot to mute and had too much distracting background noise going on. Eventually I mastered the discomfort and found a way to use both humor and silence to stimulate conversation, knowing someone would eventually speak up.

Meeting like this on Zoom and Webex, everyone has had to learn how to make appropriate eye contact, pause for interactions, modulate their voice and re-learn such Kindergarten conventions as raising hands and waiting their turn.

I wasn’t the only one struggling to work through this, of course. But after getting past our initial discomfort, I’d argue, video interactions have proven to be richer than the in-person sessions we had in the past.

If you don’t believe me, imagine going back to the typical pre-Covid meeting or conference where you had to wait for the formal Q&A session before you could question or message the presenter—in contrast to doing so in real-time online—and recall all the meetings you’ve attended where a few loud people dominated the conversation and nobody else could get a word in edgewise. I know which format I prefer.

Looking back, I think my initial discomfort with the world of online meetings forced me to become better at leading lively and productive discussions. I get broader attendance (geographically) and deeper participation (chats, polls, in addition to immediate feedback and questions), making the technology-enabled interactions richer. I make sure I know every face in the Zoom tiles and will pause a meeting in the middle to say, “Hey wait, there’s someone on the screen I don’t think I’ve met yet,” to make sure every participant, no matter how junior, feels part of the discussion. And most importantly, as a global consultant, I can cover four cities in a morning, where in the past I could maybe visit four cities in a week. Why would I want to go back to the old way? In short, mastering my discomfort with the Zoom workshop made me much better at my job.

So, what is my next hill to climb? Those who were able to master a full range of digital collaboration tools to brainstorm and collaborate with team members—tools such as Slack, Miro, MS Whiteboard, and Trello—did even better this past year. I wasn’t one of them. I see the potential in these tools but, honestly, they seem beyond my tech abilities.

But with all the productivity and efficiency gains they offer I can’t go back. I know I need to muster the courage, lean in and force myself to become as comfortable with these and other online whiteboard and collaboration tools as I am now with Zoom.

Maybe we should all be seeking discomfort, because in the process of getting comfortable with the things that make us uncomfortable, we learn and grow and become better leaders. It’s also what drives innovation. As Mary Ellen Adcock, a senior vice president at the nearly 140-year-old Kroger Company told me, “Covid-19 has been Kroger’s Chief Innovation Officer.”

If we want to keep advancing the world of work, there’s a lot we can do to stay uncomfortable. We can start by foregoing some of the things—think of them as security blankets—that define our comfort zone: formal and fixed working hours, assigned offices and work spaces, in-person meetings, executive floors and offices (that’s right, the C-suite), PowerPoint documents, meetings before the meeting to prepare for the meeting, steering committees, fixed job descriptions and job titles, talent that works for one company only, formal organizational structures. And that’s just a partial list.

It’s only human to seek the comfort of the known and familiar. But if we want to continue to attract and retain talent and customers, and want to continue innovating and advancing new ideas and ways of working, we need to intentionally avoid the comfort instinct and seek discomfort.

Once we are uncomfortable with something, of course, the idea is to work hard to get comfortable with it. That is where the learning and innovation occurs. Then, as soon as we overcome that hurdle, we need to push ourselves to get uncomfortable again. Seek and repeat, again and again and again. That’s how we can “learn our way” into the future of work.

Source: To Move Forward, Leaders Need To Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable